If there’s one thing that online services like this provide is a voice for all the people who’s opinions would never be presented in the traditional media. When those online services take our voices away because they just feel like it, I say that it’s time to move on. They already have a shaky relationship with Atheists but this should be the last straw for many of us.

Like so many things in life, they need us, we do not need them.

Without people using Youtube, it wouldn’t be the online power it is today. I can already foresee that many people will say that Youtube is what everyone is using and thus you don’t have a choice if you want audience. Well, like partisan politics, this is only in your head and it hurts you when you do not realise it. You do have a choice, you just have to use it.

At the moment, many users are protesting the latest ban by reposting the removed video. This is all well and good but, and I hope to be proved wrong, Google is too big, you made them too big. They don’t give a toss. Especially for a few dozen vocal atheists.

Do you want to protest? Take your ball and go home. Make a public statement and invite your subscribers to join you. If there’s anything Youtube is taking note, that is market share. If they were to lose 50k users overnight, they might stand up and take notice.

But where should one go? Well, there are of course dozens of youtube clones out there (many of them considerably better than) but that’s also a problem by itself, for who’s to say that tomorrow that service is not going to start banning your videos as well?

This is why I’m proposing you use something a bit different. Namely Vuze

Image via CrunchBase

What is Vuze

Once upon a time, there was a BiTtorrent client called Azureus. It was the best of the bunch. Eventually they decided that P2P can also serve as a great way to serve content without having the immense costs associated with hosting everything on your own server.

They became Vuze

Now you have a service where the content is not held by them but rather by everyone who is using it. They only handle the portal/library and that’s about it. When you publish something to Vuze, you get to keep it as does anyone else who has seen it.

Yes, Vuze does retain the right to remove content from the portal as well but looking from where they started, I believe they will not be as trigger happy as Youtube, plus if things get out of hand.

Other than that, there are a few other very solid benefits to using Vuze.

You are not limited to posting Videos. You can post any kind of file you wish.

You can upload at any quality you wish, at any size you wish, at any length you wish. No need to split in 10 minute segments.

Did I mention that Vuze is a full fledged BitTorrent application? That means that you don’t have to use Vuze only but can use, say, The Pirate Bay as well

Friends and stuff but with quite a lot of extras. One of these extras is that you can share interesting torrents with your friends over a secure connection. I.e. torrents that you found in the aforementioned Pirate bay, or even your own homemade torrents for files you have on your disk.

It’s free software. This means that it’s more ethical and it gets very fast improvements. Plus whatever happens, it will never go away.

So there you have one proposal. I’m certain others will have other services that are good as well but I tend to always side with the ones who have Free Software roots. Better for everyone that way.

Youtube has dropped the ball on Atheist heads one too many times now and unless people take a definite action, they’ll just keep doing it, similar to politicians who get elected no matter what.

And that’s my two cents on this.

UPDATE: It seems youtube has reinstated the Video. Apparently it was organised muslim activists who flagged the video for removal. If that is indeed the case, then Youtube needs to, at the least, give a warning to the ones that flagged it and, my personal suggestion would be to dissalow flagging from those people in the future. They’ve already proved that they abuse the system for their own agendas.

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Indeed you're right. I know it's possible as I've seen it working here. It's possibly related to the magnet links. I haven't really researched it however

http://intensedebate.com/people/evolved evolved

Ah, TPB….how we love you…

OH SHI–

brb, fbi

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

Partyvan ftw!

The Barefoot Bum

What is necessary, of course, is a very quick and mindless way of posting Vuze content on blogs & websites.

Sean

The flag button is there to be pushed. There is nothing wrong with anyone, even with a political agenda, flagging videos they find offensive. That is why the button is there. Once the video is taken down this way, it will be reviewed by Youtube staff to determine if it was flagged legitimately. There is nothing more Youtube can do about this because new accounts can easily be created and used to flag videos.

If anything you should be happy for Youtube providing you with a free soapbox for your inane inflammatory statements and managing it as well as they do. Google looses millions of dollars to maintain Youtube as a service for everyone. They do not yet profit from it and have failed to find a model for making money with it, yet they continue to provide it.

Your atheist activism is just as bad as the Muslims. People are free to choose their religion and when you start *preaching* your agenda you reduce yourself to their level. Anyone who thinks for themselves for long enough realizes that no one has logical or physical proof for or against the existence of God. Our limited bodies do not allow us to view or barely comprehend what we cannot perceive outside this realm, let alone the vastness that we *can* perceive within the magnetic spectrum. Anyone who says they know what or what does not lie outside the boundaries of our existence is simply full of shit.

This leads to the conclusion that the issue of the Muslim courts in the UK. That it is not best attacked from a atheist standpoint but a logical one. One that states that separation of church and state is the only way courts and government can co-exist with a multifaceted population. By using the anti-faith card, you play right into their hands and make this not a discourse of reason, but of your beliefs verses theirs which the Middle East has shown us for the last several thousand years, will go nowhere fast. I want to see these courts disbandment as much as you, but this method is obviously the wrong way to go about it.

http://dbzer0.com db0

If anything you should be happy for Youtube providing you with a free soapbox […]

If there wasn't any hope for money, they would have scrapped it already. Since there is, they keep it. People didn't think a simple search was profitable until Google came. I'm going to be calling them on all their BS when and where they make them.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

Your atheist activism is just as bad as the Muslims.

You have got to be shitting me. Standing up and defending someone who has been mistreated is the same as trying to suppress freedom of speech? Are you seriously that demented?

Sean

Excuse my misspelling of existence. What I mean is I think we can both agree that no one comes back from the dead. Thus no one can tell us if they met a God or not. How can you seriously state that "We do not claim to know what is 'outside the boundaries of existence,'" then state "we do not believe in God" in the same paragraph? You are either trolling or are drawing a very thin line between what you know and what you believe. If the later you are unwillingly admitting that you are putting *faith* in the non-existence in God because that is ultimately unknowable.

You may not believe in God. That's fine and dandy, but Pat Condell clearly states his anti-religion views many times in this video. This is an Atheist standpoint and it is indeed a philosophy. Atheism is not compatible or comparable with Secularism. This is the folly of Pat Condell's issue with Muslim courts.

Sean

>we were lucky that Pat was famous and people rallied to his cause.

Your misunderstanding is that you are unaware YouTube checks *every* video that is taken down, not just Pat Condell's, who really isn't famous in my opinion. If the video is child pornography, then the appropriate action is taken. If it's some rambling troll then they put it back up.

If you think you know a better way to insure the legality of millions of videos, hundreds if not thousands uploaded every day, I'm sure Google would love to pay you to oversee it's implementation.

Sean

That is quite the logical leap and I'm not quite sure how to respond other then "yes." If you use the flag button you will see the following reasons for flags: Hateful or Abusive Content > Promotes Hatred or Violence. If you don't see the hatred in this guy's video then I'm afraid you are stupid. Although this is a gray area when it comes to speech. Apparently, hatred of Jews and blacks is not allowed on Youtube but racist statements about Muslims is ok.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

I seriously doubt that they check every video that is taken down. And even if they did have the capability to check every video that was flagged, they could just as well leave it up until they got around to checking it validity and then take it down. But since they probably don't check every flagged video, they leave it to the masses to act ethically and not abuse the system

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

You cannot be a racist again muslims. They are not a race.
Pat is not promoting hate. That peace in the end is not just for show. Pat is calling things as they are. If that is the painful truth, then that's certainly not our fault.
For example, calling a Muslim a racist is true, since their holy book asks them to outright kill the Jews.

Ridiculing a ridiculous belief like Islam or Christianity is not hate speech. We're not provoking anyone to violence (unlike, say, the Saudi Arabian Imams). Just because they are Racist, ignorant and hateful does not and should not prevent us from calling them so.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

First, I cannot troll on my own blog.

Second, I never said that God does not exist. My personal belief is that deities do not exist and explicitly the Christian God certainly does not (just because of the logical contradictions his attributes create, ie the Problem of Evil) . Simply I am an Agnostic Atheist so there is indeed a difference between what I know and what I believe. I choose to believe in what I know based on evidence. I don't believe in a God due to lack of that.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

You may not believe in God. That's fine and dandy, but Pat Condell clearly states his anti-religion views many times in this video. This is an Atheist standpoint and it is indeed a philosophy. Atheism is not compatible or comparable with Secularism. This is the folly of Pat Condell's issue with Muslim courts.

What is the Philosophy of Atheism pray?
Also, why exactly is it not compatible with Separation of church an state when Atheism has no church or religion?

I think you're just very confused on what Atheism is.

http://dbzer0.com db0

I don't have to. I've already suggested an alternative

Sean

So you are suggesting is someone posts a child getting raped that they leave it up until they can check it? You disgust me, sir.

http://intensedebate.com/people/ChickenGirl ChickenGirl

I think you're just very confused on what Atheism is.

Willfully confused, at that. You could explain it until you were blue in the face and he would refuse to understand.

http://intensedebate.com/people/ChickenGirl ChickenGirl

If you didn't write the code yourself it doesn't count! :p

http://www.intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

The flag button is there to be pushed.[…] and used to flag videos.

If the flag button is allowed to be used to game the system and remove the voices of people who you don't like then the system is broken and should be fixed.

This time we were lucky that Pat was famous and people rallied to his cause. People who are not so popular just end up getting silenced.

As for the free accounts, well, let them make new ones. At the least they are going to be annoyed.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

Yes, you got it, that exactly what I'm saying. I'm trying to get child porn on youtube and you meddling kids are always flagging the good stuff…

Just think about what you're saying sometimes…if you can think that is…

http://dbzer0.com db0

This leads to the conclusion that the issue of the Muslim courts in the UK […] I want to see these courts disbandment as much as you, but this method is obviously the wrong way to go about it.

Which method would that be? Making youtube videos and calling Islam out on their absurdity? We do attach issues like that from a logical standpoint because there isn't an "Atheist standpoint". Atheism is not a philosophy. We attach sharia law and support Secularism because the former is inhumane and the later is better for everyone.

Sean

Ok, buddy. Get off your soapbox and exercise some pragmatism. YouTube is not going to have any serious impact if a bunch of athiests stop using their site. Face it, you need YouTube. The service they provide is free. Quit bitching like you paid for it.

Secondly, YouTube did not pull your video, USERS FLAGGED IT. More then likely, organized Muslims, as they are very vocal about this and brag that it only takes 21 flags to pull a video down. I'm not trying to start an online religious war, fuck no. I don't really care as I think Militant Atheism you display is brutish and stupid. Personally, I'm Militant Agnostic:

I don't know and neither do you.

saganhill

I most certainly KNOW there is no god. And you know there is no god too.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

No, we don't NEED youtube. That's as inane as saying that we NEED Democrats. Youtube needs us as much as we need them. Their services are free, but so are many others and much better too.

Second, if the video was indeed pulled down by organised muslim activists then unless Youtube gives them a smackdown for taking down something obviously legal, it's still not good

http://intensedebate.com/people/SeandBlogonaut SeandBlogonaut

DOn't you just love this tactic, this and the false DMCA claims to supress freedom of speech – Mercy ministries an abusive cult like treatment facility has recently been caught doing this.

Aita

You realize that Google is pro-atheist, right? That who you should be bitching about is RIAA and similar, for the CR laws and the DMCA bullshit, right?

Pro-tip: If you don't understand what the fuck is going on, don't make a post about it; You make the rest of us look dumb.